The Push to Impeach Pete Hegseth Is On

As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth becomes more deeply mired in the scandal surrounding the military strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, familiar refrains of Beltway discourse have lurched into gear. Democrats in Congress, for instance, are issuing calls for greater “transparency” and official “accountability” and vowing to widen the probes into the murderous attacks.

There is certainly much to investigate about Hegseth, who appears to have issued a second order to kill two stranded survivors in the first strike, and then proceeded to lie about doing so. Yet, amid the well-worn rounds of congressional inquiries and special investigations, Justice Department task forces, military probes, and international court proceedings, a cabinet criminal’s forcible removal from office is an all-but-guaranteed non-result. That’s why it’s so maddening that Democratic lawmakers have largely balked at invoking the most effective tool to secure such accountability—a motion to impeach Hegseth.

It’s hard to think of a case where impeachment is a more appropriate remedy. After all, if murder doesn’t qualify as a “high crime and misdemeanor,” what does? And an impeachment inquiry, closely targeted on documenting criminal charges, would be an encouraging first step in holding Hegseth accountable for his conduct in an actually meaningful way.

Of course, an allied piece of conventional Beltway wisdom is that impeachments are inherently political—and therefore politically risky. And few Beltway operators are more conventional than the Democrats’ terminally risk-averse House leader, Hakeem Jeffries. So it wasn’t shocking when Jeffries made a point of ruling out an official impeachment inquiry not long after news of Hegseth’s role in the second strike first broke. Jeffries claimed that planned investigations by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees should produce “a meaningful investigation which we can hope would be bipartisan”—while also claiming that House Republican leaders were far too partisan to permit any impeachment articles to make it onto the legislative calendar.

Leaving aside the plain self-contradictory nature of Jeffries’s stand, the mechanism of impeachment isn’t actually as cumbersome as he makes it out to be. Under Rule IX of the House, any member can bring a motion to impeach a member of the executive branch under a privileged vote—meaning that House leaders in either major party don’t need to approve it in advance. Once an impeachment resolution is introduced under Rule IX, the House has a two-day window to vote on it, in a straight up-or-down balloting—or else to endorse another resolution to dismiss the impeachment one.

This is precisely the course of action that Michigan Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar is now pursuing against Hegseth. On Tuesday, Thanedar announced that he had filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth.

Thanedar’s motion cites both the second strike carried out on September 2 and the recent damning Pentagon investigation into Hegseth’s unauthorized sharing of details of a bombing raid in Yemen on an unsecure Signal group chat. “Here’s a Secretary of Defense who is managing a trillion-dollar budget, sending people into harm’s way, and he needs to be acting responsibly,” Thanedar said in an interview with The Nation. “The fact that he gives out war plans on a Signal chat puts our service members in grave danger.”

As for the Caribbean strike, Thanedar added, “Really, this is murder; it has nothing to do with drugs and protecting the United States”—noting as well that President Donald Trump has recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of trafficking some 450 tons of cocaine into the United States.

The first article in Thanedar’s resolution charges Hegseth with “murder and conspiracy to murder,” bypassing the more vague and euphemistic suggestion in most mainstream press reports that he may be guilty of “war crimes.” (An ancillary problem with this phrasing is that there is no declared war, or even a similarly euphemized “police action” that governs the US military’s rules of engagement in jury-rigged, barely rationalized attacks that are themselves illegal.) The article specifies that, in the September 2 attack, “in compliance with the order of Peter B. Hegseth, the Armed Forces carried out a second strike with the express, willful, and deliberate purpose of killing the shipwrecked survivors of the first strike,” citing provisions in the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual that proscribe actions that deprive survivors of quarters after attack—let alone actions that kill them outright after an initial attack. The second article calls for Hegseth to be impeached and removed from office for circulating the plans for the Yemen strike on the Signal group chat last spring.

Given that leaders in both parties want nothing to do with it, Thanedar’s resolution might not ultimately travel too far. But there’s a great deal to be said for simply initiating a serious discussion of Hegseth’s impeachment on the Hill. To begin with, an impeachment resolution represents a come-to-Jesus moment for all members of Congress to take a clear stand on Hegseth’s actions. For Democrats in particular, the continued invocation of the Trump White House’s criminal trespasses and threats to democratic self-rule start to ring hollow in the absence of clear measures to attach tangible consequences to the perpetrators. “That’s what makes them look weak,” said a consultant familiar with the Thanedar resolutions, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “I’ve heard it before, it’s a bit of a DC elite bubble thing to say, ‘Oh, the last impeachments backfired or failed.’ But it’s not true—the Democrats didn’t really pay any price at the ballot box” after their successive bids to impeach Trump in 2019 and 2021. “I think you can’t go out there and say, ‘They’re criminals and [Trump’s] trying to be a dictator,’ which is true and important, without something to back it up. And it’s not like they’d be taking a run at this at a time when he’s at an even split in the polls; he’s got a 20 percent disapproval gap.”

That’s a key reason that, even before they were formally introduced, Thanedar’s articles of impeachment got resounding endorsements from members of the Democratic Party’s activist base. “Pete Hegseth is an incredibly unqualified Christian nationalist lackey and alleged abuser who never should have been nominated in the first place,” said Hunter Dunn, a spokesperson for the 50501 movement, which has been instrumental in organizing the successful wave of No Kings protests across the country. “His support of Russia’s war crimes, the Genocide in Gaza, his role in Signalgate, his attempts to censor press, and his overall incompetence would each be reason enough for his removal. After he murdered multiple sailors in the Caribbean, the only place he belongs is in a jail cell. As such, we’re working on a number of different avenues to push towards his ousting, including having our members contact congressional representatives and lobby for impeachment, leveraging our social media platforms to build public support for an investigation into Hegseth and his removal, and targeted demonstrations.” Thanedar, who had earlier sought to initiate an Article IX impeachment measure against Trump until Democratic leaders prevailed on him to withdraw, is now looking for a better reception from the party’s rank-and-file members, together with some possible recruits from the chamber’s increasingly fractious GOP majority. “What we saw from the Epstein files vote was that Republicans are now willing to question this president, and are willing to go against him on the right issue.” And if nothing else, he added, a Hegseth impeachment vote should supply a record to keep organizing around. “The question is not ‘What is the politics?’ or ‘What do the polls say?’ It’s more about, “Does this amount to a crime?’ If it does, then we need to do what is right…. This puts members of Congress on notice to take a stand. That’s what we’re elected to do.”